Micronutrients Powder (MNP)

Since 2012, UNICEF has been working with States' Ministry of Health and partners to provide quality nutrition services in the emergency affected States in Northeast of Nigeria. Since then, the service of Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF), Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) to treat children with Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) and Micronutrient interventions are being reinforced and scaled up. UNICEF has supported the treatment of over 16,000 children between January and December 2015 in Adamawa State through the provision of Ready To Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), training, supportive supervision and monitoring were provided. Additionally, about 1.4 million children received Vitamin A supplements.

National nutrition surveys using the SMART method were conducted to monitor the nutrition situation in the area. The result from the 2015 SMART survey (September 2015) showed that 9.5% of the children have Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM), while 2.6% of the children have SAM in the Northeast. This is considered as high prevalence and if these children are left untreated, the risk of mortality increase by 9 folds compared to well-nourished children. Therefore, there is need to ensure access to nutrition services to all children affected by SAM to save lives of children in the targeted States.

Currently, there is enough RUTF in the country to provide support to the children with SAM during their first 8 months of 2016 in Adamawa State. However, there are inadequate trained health workers, especially women, and those trained are frequently transferred to other health facilities.

in order to address this daunting challenge, UNICEF is partnering with the State to rollout CMAM, IYCF and MNP to Local Government Areas (LGAs) in the following order: